There are so many mixed feelings about sleep training (guilt, strident confidence, defensiveness, desperation, resignation, and so on) and I think, in part, it's a reflection of more general parenting philosophies. There are some of us that started out thinking that we'd be exceptionally responsive to our baby's needs and we'd give up taking care of ourselves for the privilege of taking care of an innocent baby. There are others of us who vowed to keep our own personal and professional lives while making reasonable compromises for our new baby. And still some of us went into this parenting thing with no clue that we'd have any "parenting philosophy" whatsoever until we saw that horrid woman with her sweet child and she… <you fill in the blank>. Somehow, many of us become so wildly committed to the paths that we chose explicitly or stumbled upon. Despite the wildly controversial issues that parents (mostly mothers) feel compelled to fight for (breast or bottle, daycare or SAH, CIO or co-sleep), the truth is that not much of it makes a reliable difference in the futures of our children. Short of flat-out abuse, neglect and SERIOUS conflict in the family context, most parenting is "good enough." And I for one am so grateful for that empirical fact.

I recently received the following question from a reader:

My short response is: you're doing everything right, your baby is following very normal sleep patterns, and I hope that the 4-month sleep transition doesn't make things harder. This really is a description of the average sleep pattern many 3.5 month olds experience. In response to the main question about whether there are benefits to sleep training (and not merely the lack of detrimental effects), no, there is no well-designed study that can answer your question. But researchers and consumers of research can use the data as they like. So… yes, good sleep has been consistently associated with better performance on complex problem-solving tasks, better memory, improved mood (decreased risk of depression) and better physical reflexes. But many babies suck at sleeping and this "suckiness" has NOT been proven to be associated with long-term negative outcomes. More to the point of the reader's question, being a "well trained" sleeper as a baby has not been shown to lead to any BETTER outcomes. That's because it is almost impossible to design the right study to answer this question rigorously. I'll save you the research methodology course that I suffered through, but suffice it to say that to really establish that there are actual long-term, IMPORTANT benefits to having been sleep-trained, you'd have to randomly assign parents to either sleep train their child or not, no matter their actual parenting philosophy, their own upbringing, their child's temperament, the amount of support they had in their lives, the necessity for parents to go back to work early in the child's life, and so on. In short, there's no ethical way to run such a study. So… what we're stuck with is a bunch of studies that look at some families that DO sleep train and some that DON'T. And guess what? These families don't only differ on whether they sleep trained or not. They differ on all the other variables that I just mentioned: parenting philosophy, family history, support, family structure, child temperament, and so on. And those factors have a complex, interactive effect on child outcomes. Some children's temperaments are easier than others and this makes some children easier to sleep train for some parents. For other parents, they don't feel the need to sleep train these children with easier temperaments. Both families and children fair well. You can see the problem when you then add all the other variables that I mentioned. In short, there's no ethical way to do this kind of science to answer the question absolutely.

So… what we do know is being a sensitive, responsive parent while at the same time setting reasonable limits matters for the long-term developmental outcomes of our children. So does being personally happy, emotionally resilient, financially secure, and happily married (or in a secure, non-conflictual relationship). And if we're none of those things, if we're financially stressed, a single mom, bouncing back and forth between depression and "ok-ness", we are STILL likely to bring up our children to be thoughtful, loving, resilient, motivated, successful adults. All the research I have read (way too much to link to here, but see the books I reference in the sidebar), reviewed, and conducted myself has led me and many others to the same general conclusion: We need to screw up BIG TIME to really put our children at serious risk for long-term negative outcomes. Oh, and BTW, we can also do everything "right" and still have children who take drugs, have unsafe sex, get arrested or end up sad and lonely at the end of their life.

Sleep training matters in the day-to-day way that parenting always matters. But we're all trying to do our best, working with what instincts we have and compensating for what we don't with as much reading and surfing the web as we can fit in. Most of us will muddle through because we care enough to do our best (yes, it sounds like a commercial and I am SO cheesy sometimes). And chances are, our kids will be just fine, no matter if we Ferberize, co-sleep, CIO, use "no-cry" strategies, or say to hell with all of this sleep training.